Innholdsfortegnelse for May 26, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken. New Directions, 125 pp., $19.95 The first fictional spacecraft were thrilling, vehicles for exploration and discovery, but it wasn’t long before writers realized that spaceships would also be workplaces like their waterborne counterparts, with tight quarters where repetitive tasks and interpersonal friction are occasionally interrupted by interludes of existential peril. The most familiar pop-cultural depiction of this, Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien, opens with the groggy crew of Nostromo, a star freighter and ore refinery en route to Earth, coming out of stasis to scratch, stretch, make coffee, and bicker about money—until, that is, they are terrorized and picked off by a hideous unknown creature. Gnomic and elliptical where most science fiction…

The Devil’s Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail by Kristen Green. Seal, 332 pp., $30.00 In The Allure of the Archives (1989), a gem of a book, the French historian Arlette Farge talks about unearthing, insofar as it’s possible, a past that’s not quite past—particularly in relation to the lives of women, whose histories have often been hidden, forgotten, or written over, women spoken about but whom we seldom hear speaking. Combing through the judicial archives at the Préfecture of Paris, Farge reads the sullen or angry answers that ordinary eighteenth-century Parisian women, some of the city’s poorest and most vulnerable, give to the police who have arrested them. And she knows that to understand what they say, or don’t…

Africa’s Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story by Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla, translated from the French by Thomas Fazi. London: Pluto, 168 pp., $99.00; $26.95 (paper) The CFA Franc Zone: Economic Development and the Post-Covid Recovery by Ali Zafar. Palgrave Macmillan, 246 pp., $149.99 What is wrong with Africa? Of the world’s twenty-five poorest countries, twenty-one lie south of the Sahara. Crowded streets and informal markets from Dakar to Mombasa teem with hawkers selling candles, batteries, matches, toys, condoms, plastic cups, nylon wedding gowns, fake jewelry, and other cheap imports, but the region itself manufactures almost nothing. Forty percent of the components in Samsung’s phones are made in onceimpoverished, war-torn Vietnam. None are made in Africa, even though some of the materials used to produce them are…

Molière: The Complete Richard Wilbur Translations Library of America, 2 volumes, 1,086 pp., $70.00 When Richard Wilbur undertook in 1952 to translate Molière’s The Misanthrope, it was as compensation for his inability (despite having received a grant for the purpose) to write verse plays of his own: “They didn’t come off. They were very bad, extremely wooden.” With his first two books of poetry, The Beautiful Changes (1947) and Ceremony (1950), Wilbur had been promptly recognized as an important young poet working with total confidence in traditional forms, and in the age of T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry verse drama seemed a promising move. As it turned out, translating Molière became a lifelong commitment, an opportunity virtually to inhabit a thoroughly congenial alternate identity. An exciting production of The…

The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History by Monica Kim. Princeton University Press, 435 pp., $35.00; $24.95 (paper) On New Year’s Day, I went to a bookstore in Cheonan, South Korea, to buy a wall map of the country. The label said, simply, “Map of Korea,” so when I got home and unfolded it, I was surprised to see that it showed both North and South—the entire peninsula and its hundreds of surrounding islands. The wars of the twentieth century had turned one country into two, mutually cordoned off and inaccessible; South Koreans are not permitted to visit North Korea, or even its websites, and vice versa. My new map felt strangely aspirational. The armored boundary between the two Koreas, the Demilitarized Zone that meanders along the…

The Chevron Doctrine: Its Rise and Fall, and the Future of the Administrative State by Thomas W. Merrill. Harvard University Press, 355 pp., $35.00 Does the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have the authority to impose a mask mandate on people who travel on planes, trains, and buses? In April a federal district court in Florida offered a clear answer: Absolutely not. The court gave an exceedingly narrow reading to the CDC’s powers under laws enacted by Congress. In the process, it sent an unmistakable signal: some conservative judges will not allow federal agencies to protect public safety and health unless Congress has unambiguously given them the authority to do so. That signal is ominous. In a period of congressional deadlock, federal agencies often have to take the lead…

COUSIN BOB & COUSIN WENDY To the Editors: During the recent annual meeting of the American Oriental Society, a senior Sanskrit scholar offered me a “good news, bad news” proposition. The good news was that our newly revised single-volume edition of the Princeton University Press translation of the ancient Sanskrit epic the Ramayana of Valmiki had been reviewed in this journal [Wendy Doniger, “Hearing the Ramayana Again,” NYR, April 7]. The original, seven-volume version had been published sequentially between 1986 and 2017 by a consortium of five Sanskrit scholars. As the originator of the project, I served as both a principal translator of four of the volumes and the general editor of the entire series. The translation and its annotation received glowing reviews in scholarly journals, while some volumes had…

There is the war, and then there is the war about the war. Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine is being fought in fields and cities, in the air and at sea. It is also, however, being contested through language. Is it a war or a “special military operation”? Is it an unprovoked invasion or a human rights intervention to prevent the genocide of Russian speakers by Ukrainian Nazis? Putin’s great weakness in this linguistic struggle is the unsubtle absurdity of his claims—if he wanted his lies to be believed, he should have established some baseline of credibility. But the weakness of the West, and especially of the United States, lies in what ought to be the biggest strength of its case against Putin: the idea of war crimes. It is…

Surrealism Beyond Borders an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 11, 2021–January 30, 2022; and Tate Modern, London, February 24–August 29, 2022. Catalog of the exhibition by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, with contributions from Dawn Ades, Patricia Allmer, and others. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 383 pp., $65.00; $40.00 (paper) (distributed by Yale University Press) “The surreal today is measured on the scale of our defeats.” Georges Henein, a founding member of a Cairo group of Surrealists, was responding to a questionnaire that a Paris review had sent him concerning the state of the movement in 1946, twenty-two years on from André Breton’s inaugural Manifeste du surréalisme. What defeats had Henein in mind? For him and his painter colleagues in al-Fann wa-l-Hurriyya (Art and Freedom),…

Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self by Julie Sedivy. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 346 pp., $29.95 Alfabet/Alphabet: A Memoir of a First Language by Sadiqa de Meijer. Windsor, Ontario: Palimpsest/Anstruther, 153 pp., $14.95 (paper) A few weeks ago I was invited to the book festival in Trieste, in northeast Italy, a city of divided loyalties and complicated history. At its center is an old Austro-Hungarian port; some of its street signs are bilingual, in Italian and Slovenian. The city was “Tergeste” to the Romans, founded on the site of a former settlement as a fortress against Illyria, and it has been variously dominated by Frankish, Venetian, Balkan, Italian, and Austrian influences in the centuries since. After World War II it was a free zone administered by the…